Samuel J. Tilden

Samuel J. Tilden was the Democratic candidate who won the popular vote in the disputed United States presidential election of 1876. Conflicting electoral returns left the result to a commission and political negotiation, which awarded the presidency to Rutherford B. Hayes.

The wider career recorded for Samuel J. Tilden also included service as Governor of New York. The biographical record places the beginning of Samuel J. Tilden’s life at New Lebanon and the end at Yonkers, giving the career a geographical span that is not apparent from the headline events alone.

Gore Vidal’s 1876 makes Samuel J. Tilden’s presidential campaign the political climax of its centennial-year satire. Through the fictional journal of Charles Schermerhorn Schuyler, the novel moves among party machines, newspapers and elite drawing rooms before arriving at the disputed election between Tilden and Rutherford B. Hayes. Tilden therefore embodies the unresolved constitutional crisis at the end of Reconstruction, when the popular and electoral results became entangled in bargaining over contested state returns and the future of federal policy in the South.